Nancy Pelosi briefly thought she could have died on January 6, 2021.

Two years later, her husband was threatened with political violence at their home.

“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”

This was the chilling, threatening question that the intruder asked Paul Pelosi just before he bludgeoned the 82-year-old with a hammer inside their San Francisco home. The menacing jeers from the rioters who screamed “Nancy, Nancy!” in the Capitol on January 6 were echoed by the intruder.

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Female Speaker of the House” is Pelosi’s new book. Its opening and closing messages are a reflection of this escalating rhetoric and violence.

Pelosi recalls her four decades of legislative experience in Congress, but she also gives a rare glimpse into her private turmoil surrounding the attack on her husband. She is sending a serious warning to a new generation of Americans that mocking and imitating political violence will drive them away from public service.

Pelosi writes: “The current climate is one of threats and assaults that must end.”

We cannot ask people to take on public service if it means putting their loved ones and families at risk.

Pelosi’s book is familiar to those who have followed her career from “housewife” to House member, to House Speaker. The California Democrat speaker emerita has left the leadership and will be running for re-election in the House this autumn.

She won the speaker’s gavel twice, worked with seven presidents, and most recently played a crucial role in convincing President Joe Biden, in a quiet manner, to reconsider his decision to stay in the rematch of the 2024 presidential elections against Republican Donald Trump. Biden bowed out.

It’s not the last chapter, but the first that brings a new dimension to the Pelosi years. They detail in a personal and painful way the toll the violent strain of America is having on civic life.

She writes: “I don’t think we’ll ever feel safe.”

Pelosi’s assessment of America’s dangerous discourse was written well before Trump’s July assassination. It comes after the shootings of former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords and Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, both in Congress.

Pelosi recalls her shock at being “pulled from the Speaker’s Platform” and out the House chamber the afternoon of January 6 by security as Trump sent rioters to storm through the halls. Some were searching for her.

She told the U.S. Capitol Police that she could handle the situation and wanted to finish the job as Congress certified the 2020 elections.

She writes, “Their answer was short.” “‘No, you can’t.'”

She describes how, after being taken to safety in Fort McNair, Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican Leader, and Chuck Schumer the Senate Democratic Leader, huddled together, desperately calling the Pentagon for National Guard troops, to restore order to the Capitol. She calls House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy a Trump ally, as being almost completely unseen.

She was so worried about the threats made by rioters against Vice President Mike Pence, who was hiding in the Capitol, that she called him and told him: “Don’t tell anyone where you are.”

She writes, “It took the Guard three hours to reach the Capitol Complex from the moment I was dragged away from the House chamber.” It took three and a quarter hours to remove the rioters.

She was informed of the blood spilled outside the Speaker’s Lobby after she had surveyed the wreckage, which included broken glass, splintered wooden, and other debris. She wrote that the mob “literally defecated” on floors and rugs in some places, such as her office. What was left was pure destruction.

She wrote that she had been in war zones and was in Kyiv when the Russian invasion began, thinking that she could die in Ukraine. She wrote: “I briefly felt the same on 6 January.”

She writes, “When I became the Speaker of the House, I knew I was going to be a target.” “However our accepting of the risk is something fundamentally different for our family.”

She was woken up in the middle night, not quite two years after the first “Knock.” Knock. Knock. Pound, Pound. Pound, Pound,” the Capitol Police security detail outside her door in Washington.

She writes: “The officers’ expressions are grim.”

“It’s Mr. Pelosi. “He’s been assaulted in your home.”

Is he all right?

“We don’t know.”

Is he still alive?

“We don’t know.”

Pelosi recalls the frantic phone calls, flight to San Francisco and hospitalization of her husband, as well as the long recovery period. Their youngest daughter described him as a bandaged Frankenstein.

Her son Paul Jr. went to the home of the family to clean up the blood and broken glass. Alexandra Pelosi, who was a high-schooler when Pelosi ran for Congress for the first time, said that if she had known what she had signed up for, she “would never have given you my approval.”

The attacker was convicted, sentenced to prison and tried. Pelosi wrote that the story about Paul’s assault would not disappear.

She wrote: “Our home is still a crime scene of the most heartbreaking kind.”

Pelosi stated that her children had told her for many years Paul only slept in her bedroom when she was present. She said he still has headaches and dizzy episodes, and that she had seen him faint twice and fall from vertigo. She wrote that she was still changing the bandages on his arm as of February.

She writes that the “true terror” was the dehumanizing remarks made by Republicans, from Trump down to Donald Trump Jr. who posted on social media a Paul Pelosi costume for Halloween, as well as the way crowds “laughed, cheered, and applauded” these cruel remarks.

She writes, “I was deeply saddened for my country.”

Pelosi places the two bloody incidents in the arc her career. From the way Republicans vilified Pelosi in countless ads when she was first elected Democratic leader, to how protesters spit at Democrats, including civil-rights leader Rep. John Lewis on the day that the House voted to pass the Affordable Care Act to the severed head of a pig left outside the family home days before January 6.

Pelosi wrote that she hears “especially young females” hesitant to put their family in danger when she talks to them about running for office.

“This isn’t the way it should be in our country — if you work for public service, your family shouldn’t be a victim.”